View Full Version : Goodbye DirectX? AMD hears from developers....
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2011/03/16/farewell-to-directx/1
Petr Schreiber
17-03-2011, 08:33
Hi Kent,
this is kind of both interesting and strange article. As it is mentioned towards the end, you can go workaround graphic API completely using OpenCL right now... and many already do that for their almost realtime raytracers.
I wonder what is AMD thinking about right now. Should we expect some new (ATi specific?) approach announcement?
I am happy with current state when OpenCL is supported both by NVIDIA and ATi, please do not start to run away from this ballance again :D
I was really hoping once the consoles reach their performance top, developers will stop running for extreme graphics and finally put more efforts to fine tuning things like gameplay, AI or sound design. But it seems majority just wants to render explosive barrels with atom resolution... this will never change :p
And as a side note - OpenCL can be used along with grapic API (OpenGL/Direct3D), so you can do hybrid approach, where you don't need to care of trivial stuff like triangle setup, and you can do the intensive or for shaders too clumsy task via OpenCL.
So what problem do the developers have again? :D
Petr
I was surprised and confused by all of this too Petr. But if you remember those lectures about graphics hardware that I had linked a while back... the professor was really excited about all programmable gpu's like Larrabee. It seems game developers don't want a fixed pipeline. As you said opencl was created along with shaders to give developers direct access, so I hope we don't see each manufacturer going back to DOS days and developing their own specific code again.
About consoles, I hate that games are made for consoles first and then sort of ported over for PC's. It ruined Unreal for me. Although the unreal 3 engine is really nice, Unreal Tournament 3 is no fun. The UI is terrible, you lost all the reconfigurability that you had in Unreal Tournament 2004.
The only thing I take from this article is that nothing can be taken for granted and get ready for some major changes soon, I just hope they are good ones.
I found the article interesting too, I think in the future portable devices like smart phones & tablet computers are going to be where most new graphics development occurs.
On the subject of Game Engines did anyone see the new Unreal Engine 3 Demo? Apparently some people think the demo is going to be turned into a game for the next generation of game consoles.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttx959sUORY
Petr Schreiber
20-03-2011, 10:36
Hi Matthew,
I like the visual side of Samaritan demo, it looks a bit like Blade Runner :)
I agree portable devices are getting more horsepower, but I suspect the new wave of development on them will just repeat the steps in the evolution of 3D graphics as we've already seen on PC, which is given by fact they are programmed in similar way. When you have a look at latest OpenGL ES, it looks like core profile of desktop OpenGL a lot.
I would consider interesting any experiments with augmented reality with portable devices, such as the night sky "browsers" on Android cell phone friend has - you just look through the device to the sky and can see where planets and stars are. Doing the same in city environment would be cool (but it could also increase rate of man-car accidents I guess). Something like the device in Curfew (http://www.thecurfewgame.com/) game.
Petr